Ecuador
Palestine solidarity; neoliberal president assaults Mexican Embassy

Quito, Ecuador

April 8, 2024 — Most of the world commemorated Al Quds Day on Friday, April 5. On Saturday I traveled to Quito to join the annual commemoration. This year it was a march of solidarity with Palestine that started in Arbolito Park and ended with a protest at the Israeli Embassy against the genocide in Gaza.

The event was organized by Comité Unitario de Solidaridad de Ecuador con Palestina, which has promoted numerous marches in Quito since the Flood of Al Aqsa of October 7, answering the Zionist occupation which Palestine has resisted for 75 years.

During my two-hour taxi ride from Ibarra to Quito, passing through the fertile Andean province of Imbabura and the mountainous desert in Pichincha province, passengers and the driver were in shock, discussing the incredible assault hours earlier by Ecuadorian police on the Mexican Embassy in Quito. We passed that embassy in the north of Quito about 9:30 am, where I saw a few heavily armed police who were still on the street. I was absolutely focused on giving my support to the people of Palestine, so not even that scene would divert me.

About 100 marchers, including seniors, children and disabled persons, were spirited in their solidarity and defense of Palestine against the settler-state colonial entity and its imperial U.S. partners. Shoes of children were collected and placed on the ground in front of the embassy to symbolize the many thousands of people slaughtered by U.S. bombs. Flags of the U.S. and Israel were spattered with red paint and burned.

Speakers denounced the fascistic storming of the Mexican Embassy, comparing it with the Israeli bombing of Iran’s embassy in Damascus on April 1, which the U.S. has not condemned. (See the video of the march at fb.watch/rjDn2jk1C.)

Mass outrage over attack on embassy

Disgusting videos have gone viral online, with accounts of Ecuadorian police storming the Mexican Embassy to kidnap Ecuador’s ex-Vice President Jorge Glas. Mexican Foreign Minister Roberto Canseco Martínez was thrown to the ground when he tried to protect his embassy against the invaders.

According to Jorge Glas’s lawyer, Sonia Vera, Glas was beaten to the floor, stomped on and kicked in the head, spine and legs. A video shows the injured Glas being forced to hobble to the plane which flew him to a Guayaquil prison. Most troubling of all, Glas is now hospitalized and in a coma.

Guillermo Lasso and his predecessor Lenín Moreno were Ecuador’s most anti-people presidents until now. The regime of President Daniel Noboa, the comprador son of a billionaire banana oligarch, is a disaster. Bankers and bananeros can buy an election, but they cannot govern.

Neoliberalism has dismantled the celebrated progressive welfare state and established in its place a violent narco-state with no respect for our impoverished working class, “democracy” or Ecuador’s laws. Historian Juan Paz y Mińo does not hesitate to call this development fascist.

Ecuador is alone before the world, “totally and absolutely discredited,” said Guillaume Long, former Minister of Foreign Affairs. (Radio Pichincha Multimedia, April 7)

Even the pro-U.S. Organization of American States Secretary General Luis Almagro and the ultra-right libertarian president of Argentina, Javier Milei, have denounced Ecuador’s violations of international law.

President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) in a press statement April 9 criticized the U.S. government, in which he said, “There were very ambiguous pronouncements from the United States and Canada in response to this grievance.”

Glas convicted without evidence

Ex-Vice President Glas was a useful scapegoat-political prisoner in the ruling class’ psychological war to brainwash people, especially the younger generation, that the decade of gains won under progressive former President Rafael Correa was rooted in corruption. Glas was convicted in 2017 without evidence of “illicit association” in the Odebrecht case, in which Brazilian construction company Odebrecht allegedly bribed officials in 12 countries in exchange for financial benefits, and later of bribery.

How many people know that Glas’s only crime was to publicly expose in writing the corruption of his running mate Lenín Moreno two weeks after their inauguration? Lawfare, the use of the law as a political weapon, transformed Glas — the engineer responsible for overseeing many of the great infrastructure developments in the decade when Rafael Correa was president — into an alleged criminal.

Attorney General Diana Salazar, who destroyed Glas’s reputation when she prosecuted his Odebrecht case, intends to finish the job by charging him with crimes she alleges were committed during his work of overseeing the 2016 earthquake rehabilitation. Salazar, with powerful forces behind her, including the corporate media, has stigmatized Ecuador in the eyes of the world as a country with no respect for the rule of law.

Every conscious person in Ecuador is saying that prioritizing the prosecution of “criminal” Jorge Glas over relations with Mexico and the Vienna Convention was a “grave error.” People are shaking their heads in dismay. Mexico will take its case against Ecuador to the International Court of Justice and other venues as well.

Many questions arise, because the people of Ecuador arguably need Mexico and value our international reputation much more than having the U.S. as a patron. Noboa got elected with a promise to tackle the issues of insecurity and systemic crime. To be effective, he would need Mexico’s help with these vital issues.

Instead of talking to Mexico’s President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO), Noboa picked a fight with him, a perfect reflection of the way his counterparts in Washington relate to the rest of the world. AMLO recently recounted how Noboa (without mentioning him by name) was elected fortuitously after gangsters assassinated one of the candidates. Ecuador’s young president reacted to AMLO by declaring the Mexican ambassador persona non grata.

Countless young Ecuadorians are students in Mexico. A flood of Ecuadorians is passing through the country bound for the northern border, seeking jobs and/or escaping the violence which has taken over the streets of coastal cities.

CONAIE calls for Noboa’s resignation

Leonidas Iza, President of the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador (CONAIE), in an interview with RT stated:

“International rights cannot be broken, cannot be violated. The immediate consequences are in three different areas:

1. First, international diplomacy.

2. Second, the internal situation in Ecuador has generated a migratory phenomenon in the country of transit [to the United States], Mexico. What will be the attitude of their citizens, their authorities?

3. And third, logically, the commercial economic effects. Ecuador exports about $350 million per year. If we do not have a friendly relationship with Mexico, what will happen to the whole commercial system?

“We have an opportunity. The rulers who do not represent us, who do not understand the dynamics, are very limited in governing. We are going to demand that the National Assembly, the authorities should generate a process of accountability. They can carry out a trial of impeachment.

“As for the president of the Republic, if he has not been able to govern and is going to break off relations with the states of the world, with the brother countries of Latin America, the best thing that could happen is that, if he has dignity, he should resign the presidency of Ecuador.” (tiktok.com, RT, April 7)

Luisa González, president of the Citizen Revolution Party of Rafael Correa and Jorge Glas, is also calling for the impeachment of President Daniel Noboa. On April 21 Ecuadorians will vote on an 11-point referendum, by which Noboa intends to consolidate the destructive neoliberal agenda Lenín Moreno instituted six years ago.

CONAIE has been advocating a “No” vote on every question. The Citizen Revolution Party may now join this opposition to demand a “No” vote on all 11 questions to crush Noboa.